Field Discovery: SmartRecruiters

My present role has me positioned inside a large organization - our campus (I work for a university) has over 4,500 employees, and the university system of which we are a part has more than 21,000 employees. Needless to say, when we look at technical solutions, we're looking at large-scale enterprise wide systems that can accomodate four geographically diverse campuses and a statewide healthcare organization. Early in my career I spent time in corporate HR for a couple Fortune 500s - but between those roles and my current one, I spent some time with a nonprofit.

The organization was nationwide, with affiliates in 17 states, but HR was housed out of the organization's headquarters. One of the challenges in my role was helping to establish an efficient, electronic way to accept applications, manage the associated transactions of that process, etc. Eventually, we were able to piggyback onto our payroll system with a workable - but by no means outstanding - ATS. That said, we looked at options and alternatives, with cost always being a primary factor in any decision we might make. My point being, if SmartRecruiters had been around at the time I think our decision (and ultimately our business practice) might have turned out differently.

Why? The cost of course. It's free. But there's more to it than just that.

The gist of it is this: organizations can use SmartRecruitersas their own, fairly personalized, ATS. The system allows you to drop advertisements to all the typical places with a quick click, blast the opening out to all your social media hubs, and more. There is no cost to use the system - it is free; there are additional pay options based on your organization's FTE count, but even those costs (which are in no way necessary to use the tool and at a glance essentially provide you with dedicated customer service support, some ad discounts, and previews of new add-ons in beta) are minimal if you choose to go that route.

Granted, I haven't utilized SmartRecruiters but I have and currently use an job advertising agency whose cost model is similar on the ad front wherein we only pay for the actual cost of our ads - no differently than if we placed them ourselves - and they through the magic of bulk ad placement make their money from the posting outlets we and their other clients use. The model has worked for us, we've saved a substantial bit of money over the last three years since joining forces, and we have no plans on moving away from that model anytime soon.

Couple that with a no-cost, by all signs pretty slick ATS and SmartRecruiters seems like the perfect option for non-profits, start-ups, and small to mid-size organizations of any kind. And if you're captaining the HR/Talent Management ship, it's always a big win when you can point to strategic decisions your team has made/implemented that both add value and save money. But enough of my rambling, below is a short video that gives a breakdown of the tool - take a look, take a moment to read up on the resource, and maybe if it's your lucky day you've just found your new talent acquisition system.